After a quick scan I think Roadbeer got it right. Usually the 15 zones won't be full beyond the last couple hour scramble.

In short there are still a dozen more ways we can improve and increase the amount of information to players and we will begin chipping away at that list early in the new year.

But in the meantime Roadbeer is correct, if your in that final couple of hours of CW and you see 60+ on both sides of planet and you queue up with a 12 man these are the possible options.

You see quickly that your just counting down from 60 seconds - great you got a full 12v12 match and its going to be important for your faction that you stick it out and finish it off.

If you see that you have a 10 minute countdown - this means there is a free zone to fight over still but you dont have an opposing team and again its worth it for your faction to stick out the 10 minute countdown and win it for your faction - although in busy periods on busy planets I think this absolutely will never happen - opponents will show up before the 10 mintues is complete.

The last option is you and your 12 man queue up and you just start counting up and up and up, this means the zones are full and you are waiting for one to free up before you will be placed into queue and you will get one of the two scenarios described above.

In that final case it is likely best that you take your 12 man over to another important planet and look for a free zone there.

Hope this helps some - spread and word and we will work on better info for players as we move forward.

I'm not singling you out, I'm just going to use your post to explain how the planetary queue works.

There are now 15 zones, that means that there is the potential for 15 matches to be going on simultaneously per planet. If the matchmaker kicks off 1 match per minute (which IIRC Russ stated was the quickest the MM will fire off after the last match is created), and after tetrising together a 12 player team from each side, that means that once the queues are filled, there are 312 players fighting on that planet. Yes, the 60+ number is annoying, I'd much rather if it showed the total number queued, or at the very least, reflect the active matches and the 156 max per side number.

In the worst of edge cases, each of those matches goes 30 minutes, and with the staggered launches at 1 per minute, the MAXIMUM wait time, during peak hours, is 15 minutes.

This doesn't mean that YOUR queue is going to fire off after 1 minute during peak time, it means that A match is being fired off. If it is unable to resolve a 12 player group for the queue your in, it will continue to try (I have actually been in a few queues where a group of 5 I was on TS with was pulled out of the queue we were in and placed w/ another group in the interest of making 12) . And while it is FIFO, it is biased towards making 12 as easily as possible (take a moment to reflect the number of combinations necessary to make 12 with people forming a group of any size from 1-12, this is why I've always been an advocate for even numbered groups, even going back to the PUB queue days).

The problem you're seeing is that there is a common misconception that there are more that 15 battles being fought on a planet at any given moment. (something I'm trying to beat into people on the House Marik TS server) and that flooding a planet with more people means your going to win it faster. It doesnt. It just means that there are more people in the queue and it's going to use them to create 12 faster. Yes, this actually makes the queue times shorter for Solos/small groups or 12 player groups but you are still at the theoretical cap of 15min as the max queue time, and are waiting for one of those 15 battles to resolve.

If you're experiencing longer than 10 minutes queue times (which is when it's supposed to fire off a turret drop) that means that all 15 zones are occupied, and your group is of an odd size that makes creating a full drop problematic., and you should probably go to one of the other planets, since that queue is stuffed beyond max.

Hope this makes some sense to a lot of people and you get a better grasp of whats going on.